What Good is God?

Kim Shippey, Senior Writer

What Good is God?
In Search of a Faith that Matters
Philip Yancey
FaithWords, New York, 2010
287 pages

Philip Yancey identifies himself as a journalist by profession, one who is committed through his writing and public speaking to explore his Christian faith thoughtfully and honestly. His latest book, What Good is God? In Search of a Faith that Matters, is a report on his travels over the past few years to several countries in search of answers. He visited China, India, South Africa, England, the Middle East, and several parts of the United States, including the Virginia Tech campus shortly after the shooting there in April 2007.

It was in front of 1,100 still bewildered, grieving young people in a student center on campus that Yancey delivered a deeply moving, healing address: “Grief proves love,” he said. “Cling to the hope that nothing that happens, not even this terrible tragedy, is irredeemable. We serve a God who has vowed to make all things new. . . . True healing takes place in community. . . . May you know the God of all comfort, and let that transforming knowledge overflow to others.”

Those are remarks from just one of ten addresses Yancey reproduces in What Good is God? In each chapter he takes us to a different location in the world, shares his observations on the people and the circumstances that took him there (the story behind the story, if you like), and then gives a version of what he said on each of those occasions.

Yancey doesn’t hesitate to write frankly about his ministry to women in prostitution at a conference in Green Lake, Wisconsin. And in a Sentinel interview he told me that it’s this chapter that, so far, has struck the strongest chord with readers. “We all need to believe in grace and forgiveness,” he said, “and the evidence of that in women who have undergone such shame and degradation gives a striking example of the Christian hope in redemption.”

Another hard-hitter is the section on drug addicts, whom he addressed at a “convention” in a church basement in Chicago. That experience convinced Yancey that “we are all vulnerable to addictions of one sort or another, for an addiction is simply a form of idolatry, something that supplants God at the center of our lives.”

Though he’s written critically before of his “student daze” in the “hermetically sealed environment” of a southern Bible college in the late 1960s, where he often landed on the faculty’s suspect list, Yancey somehow managed to survive through graduation with “some shame but much gratitude.” He was even invited three times to return to campus as a speaker.

His chapter on those college days is often amusing, especially as he became convinced that living by Marine-sergeant discipline can be a danger when it quenches the spiritual life rather than expressing it. He takes delight in quoting Dwight L. Moody (of Bible Institute fame) who once answered the question “Are you filled with the Spirit?” by saying, “Yes, but I leak!” At his Bible college, Yancey came to know a God with a soft spot for rebels, and whose Son “made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.”

We serve a God who has vowed to make all things new.

Yancey admits that it took years for him to perceive prayer as a privilege and not a duty; to see Bible reading as a source of life and not an obligation. As he said in his commencement speech to graduating students at the Bible college in April 2007: “I pray that while here you will not only believe in God, but also know deep in your soul that God believes in you.”

During our conversation about the “faith that matters,” Yancey said: “Looking back over history, I note that this faith moves from place to place: from the Middle East, to Europe, to North America, now to the developing world. I have come up with a simple, overarching principle to explain that God goes where He’s wanted.

“In the end, I find that the Gospel works its effect on individuals, on communities, and on entire societies. That is the ‘faith that matters’ I was looking for, and I hope that I’ve expressed it convincingly.”

For me, convincingly doesn’t say enough. I’d take that up several notches.

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